Technical Field
The subject matter described herein relates to communication systems, and in particular, to improving signal integrity.
Background Art
For most low cost communication channel designs that include a laser driver or a SERDES (serializer/deserializer) driver, an emerging requirement is to mitigate a non-balanced channel deficiency. The basic nature of the channel in direct modulated laser systems (e.g., a passive optical network (PON) system, a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) system, etc.) is non-balance between the positive output and the negative output of a differential signal due to the fact that a single-ended load is being driven. Furthermore, the limited number of layers available on printed circuit boards (PCBs) in low cost system-on-a-chip (SOC) solutions induces imbalance to the differential transmission lines. Degraded signal integrity due to non-balanced channel behavior in future high-speed SERDES output/inputs may be insufficiently remedied by traditional techniques of balanced compensation.